Poster for the Global Day of Action to Close Guantanamo and End Indefinite Detention

Activists around the world joined the Gitmo Global Day of Action, demanding the prison be closed and an end to the indefinite detention of its inmates. They say President Obama has not fulfilled his promises as hunger strikes and force-feeding continue.

The campaign, coordinated by the Witness Against Torture group,
along with other human rights organizations, are banding together
for a Global Day of Action to Close Guantanamo and End Indefinite
Detention.

The major demonstration took place at Lafayette Square in front
of the White House in Washington, DC. Additional rallies took
place in other US cities, including Chicago, New York and San
Francisco. London (UK), Mexico City (Mexico), Munich (Germany),
Sydney (Australia) and Toronto (Canada) are also joining the
campaign.

The protesters made speeches and wore orange jumpsuits
representing detainees as part of photogenic demonstrations,
according to a statement by Amnesty International, another
organizer of the action. The participants of the rally were also
urged to sign a petition and tweet at Barack Obama and
@WhiteHouse.

On May 23, 2013, Obama again promised to close the detention
facility but the situation in notorious prison hasn’t improved so
far. Now a year later human rights groups decided to remind the
US president of his broken promise.

“Guantanamo continues to be an example of how the United
States has forfeited the most basic human rights. We now stand as
a country that tortures and detains prisoners indefinitely,”
says the group on its website.

Obama has repeatedly promised to shut down the notorious prison.
The first ‘vow’ was made during his first presidential
campaign back in 2007.

In 2009, the freshly-inaugurated President Obama signed an
executive order to close the detention facility within one year.
However, the prison remained operational. He claimed the vow
meant to "restore the standards of due process and the core
constitutional values that have made this country great even in
the midst of war, even in dealing with terrorism."

Two years later in 2011, he signed another executive order,
focused on creating a review process for detainees aiming to
"establish, as a discretionary matter, a process to review on
a periodic basis the executive branch's continued, discretionary
exercise of existing detention authority in individual
cases."

According to another human rights group, The World Can't Wait,
which joined the campaign, Guantanamo prison “was always wrong
and no government should be able to create such torture camps.”

The hunger strike began in February 2013 as a protest by the
prisoners against their indefinite detention. More than
two-thirds of Guantanamo’s inmates refused food when the strike
reached its peak. In order to deal with the situation, the US
used to force-feeding techniques, and despite the process being
labeled as “torture” by the UN Human Rights Commission.

“Guantanamo is still open. Prisoners are being force fed
every day. They are being held in conditions of solitary
confinement and there is no word and when 77 of them, still in
the prison who have been cleared for release for years, will ever
get to live,” Debra Sweet, director of the World Can't Wait,
a US group dedicated to mobilizing mass resistance to crimes
committed by the US government, told RT.

“A policy of the US fighting to have a place where they can
do whatever they want to do to people is still intact and this is
what we are protesting along with a clear policy of indefinite
detention which president Obama in particular has embraced,”
she added.

Another organizer, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support
Coalition (TASSC) International, also calls on the Obama
administration ”to release the full Senate report on CIA
torture and ensure that the CIA does not have the final say about
what information is made public.”

According to the lawyer for one Guantanamo detainee, David H.
Remes, those who are detained in the prison are desperate.

“The greatest problem at the moment is the regime of genital
searches that the commander of the joint detention group is
instituted where …if you want to go from camp to camp you are
searched extremely thoroughly,” Remes told RT. “It’s the
psychological condition of being held in an indefinite
detention.”

However, he adds that there is “light at the end of the
tunnel” and the detainees “are pleading to get home to
their families.”

“I think that the issue is not should you house the detainees
in better housing but should you transfer them or deal with them
in a bad way from the standpoint of the system of justice. It
really doesn’t matter how you are indefinitely detained. What
matters is being indefinitely detained,” he added.

In May for the first time since the opening of the notorious
camp, US federal court ordered the US administration to supply
secret recordings showing the force-feeding of a Syrian
hunger-striker, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, 42, who was detained in the
prison.

Although the videos will not be made available to the public, it
will give non-government officials a first-hand look at the
practice of force-feeding.